Proper 17 (Aug 28-Sept 3)
Texts: Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23;
James 1:17-27; Deut 4:1-2, 6-9
YouTube: https://youtu.be/61zPlrW6EH4
THE MOST IMPORTANT PROPHECY IN HISTORY
I hope that you’ve gleaned by now that one of my main themes in preaching and teaching is to propose a substantial adjustment to our Gospel message. Namely this: God did not send Jesus to start a new religion called Christianity but to instead show us how to be better, more successful human beings.1
Last week, I thought Jeff Alderson did a good job of ringing out this theme as he filled in for me. In preaching on Ephesians 6, the spiritual armor of God, he talked about the “breast plate of righteousness” as simply learning how to live right. He used the example of his sons going through the Boy Scouts. I love that example! Scouting endeavors to teach us how to be better human beings by teaching us to help others and our community.
In the opening of the Letter of James this morning, we get a similar primer on the point of being religious. If you can’t tame your tongue and thus speak ill of others, then your religion is worthless. What is true religion? It is living right by learning how to serve others, especially the most vulnerable, like the widow and orphan in distress. What’s the old adage about being a Boy Scout? You learn to help an elderly woman to cross the street. Simple things, but basic guidance on how to live good lives. I think as we read through the Letter of James over the next several weeks, this is what we’ll find over and over again. It’s not so much a primer on religion as it is simply on being a good human being.
Let me extend this point a bit further this morning. We have come to think about the Gospel as Jesus starting this new religion called Christianity so that if we believe the teachings of this religion, we avoid going to hell when we die and instead go to heaven. We will read a passage from James in two weeks (Proper 19B) that mentions “hell,” but not as a place of eternal punishment after we die. No, hell, according to James, is the fiery consequences of using our tongues in divisive ways rather than in ways that upbuild others and bring us together in community. Simply put, our teaching about hell has been dead wrong. Hell is not a place in the afterlife from which Jesus was sent to save us. “Hell” represents the fiery places of destruction on this earth, in this history, due to all the failed ways of being human which we’ve fallen into.2 Jesus didn’t come to get us into the afterlife. Jesus came to save us from our failed ways of living in this life. He came to show us how to be human in ways that lead to flourishing lives instead of fiery deaths — the kind of fiery deaths that come from the ways we learn to kill each other.
How do we become better human beings? In addition to the theme of learning to speak kindly to one another, James will pound the theme of equality vs. inequality, of rich vs poor, of powerful people with status vs the average person. He will counsel us to pay little attention to currying the favor of the rich and powerful for instead doing things like caring for the widow and the orphan. In short, I think the Letter of James does a marvelous job of articulating the Gospel that Jesus not only proclaimed but lived among us — a model for us of how to live in response to a generous God who is the source of all good things in our lives. He came to lead us away from our fiery, hellish behaviors and into pathways that lead to flourishing lives. He especially came to show us how to live more successfully together rather than finding endless excuses for killing each other.
I’d like to end this morning by focusing on what for me is Jesus’ most important teaching, his portrait of the Son of Man judging the nations in Matthew 25. Unfortunately, this passage appears only once in the three-year lectionary (Reign of Christ A), so I think we need to find ways of keeping it before us much more often. So today is the beginning of my efforts to make that happen here with you. I want us to see how this should be read not religiously, about the afterlife, so much as simply humanly. You will need to have your Sermon Notes page before you with my own translation of this passage (Matt 25:31-46) on it. If you glance over it, you’ll see it’s one of the most familiar passages in the Bible, one that even non-churched people know. The familiar words about, ‘I was hungry and you gave me to eat, thirsty and you gave me to drink,’ etc.
Now, when we typically hear this passage, the so-called religious way to interpret it comes to mind, right? Namely, that Jesus is talking about our judgment as individuals in the afterlife. Those who care for the least go to heaven, and those who don’t go to hell. But I invite you to read it more carefully to be about something quite different. Look at the first several verses. It talks about the Son of Man coming into his glory. Does it say anything about this specifically being about the afterlife? It doesn’t, right? And who does it say the Son of Man is judging? Not individuals in the afterlife. No, it specifically says it’s a “judgment of the nations.” In other words, it’s very much about judging the nations and empires of history. Jesus is giving us a crucial, pivotal prophecy about how to judge the success or failure of nations in history.
Look at the context for a moment. We’ve talked many times about the context of the “Son of Man” coming from a passage in Daniel 7, where the true human being is juxtaposed with beastly representations of the last four empires in history. It is the true human being, the “Son of Man,” who is judged by God to be the true Lord of all history, the one whose reign will truly last. And Jesus chooses to identify himself with that Son of Man from Daniel 7.3
Now, look at the context in Matthew’s Gospel itself. The prophecy in Matthew 25 is the very last thing Jesus teaches in Matthew’s Gospel before his Passion begins. In the next chapter, Jesus is on trial before the Jewish Council and says to them, “I tell you, From now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven” (Matt 26:64). “From now on” — in other words, the Son of Man coming into his glory with the angels to judge the nations in Matthew 25 is about to happen on the Cross and in the Resurrection!!! He will judge the nations from the cross, with God’s vindication coming through the Resurrection. The judgment of the nations happens precisely when we execute Jesus on the cross according to our laws that lead to so much killing, followed by God’s supreme and gracious act of raising Jesus to new life on Easter. Here we see contrasted the ways of empires with the ways of the loving God revealed in Jesus.
Let me briefly call your attention to a couple other items in my translation of the passage (in the Sermon Notes), where I have italicized the words that are different from the usual translations, those translations made with that religious emphasis on the afterlife. One of the he things I’ve done is simply remind us that this is a judgment on the nations by translating all the subsequent pronouns referring back to the “nations” as “nations.”4 Another important thing I’ve done is to translate the Greek word usually translated as “goats” instead with the word “kids,”5 in other words, young goats. Jesus is comparing the nations to mature sheep vs. immature kids. The issue is maturity. Nations that have finally come of age, and those that haven’t. Finally, the most important change in the translation is the translation of the Greek word aiōnios,6 which is usually translated as “eternal.” In this passage: eternal life, eternal fire, eternal punishment. But from that Greek word aiōnios we get our English word “eon.” A long period of time, an age — like the Jurassic Age, which is a very long period of time. So in this passage, it’s talking about a time of life vs. a time of fire or punishment — again, in history.
And what is the judgment of the nations? It can all be boiled down to how we do or don’t take care of the least in the human family. When a nation does take care of the least (in James’ language, “the widow and the orphan”), that nation has finally come of age. It is like a grown-up sheep compared to an immature kid. It is a nation that will truly live into the age of life (“eternal life”) revealed in the Resurrection. It will finally be a nation in which its people, on balance, work together to help each other to flourish.
And the nations that fail to care for the least? They end up in a fiery destruction on the scrapheap of history, which is the fate of all empires eventually, because they are based on dominating and killing others rather than on caring for the least. Example: so far in our history as a nation, we started with one of the worst forms of chattel slavery in the history of the world. The consequences? An age of fire known as the Civil War, in which more than a million people died. Have we learned our lesson yet about racism and inequality? Are we caring for the least? What will be the ultimate fate of our nation? This is the prophecy that tells us our fate.
What are good examples of communities caring for the least? In my newsletter column I tell the story of going to the Racine Common Council meeting and speaking in support of building a new health center in the most stressed neighborhood of our city. “I was sick and you took care of me.” You see? I’d also like to lift up examples from our community of faith at Bethania. Things like every couple months feeding the hungry in the Community Meal. Or two days every month through this amazing ministry Thread by Thread, we help clothe the underdressed. I also think that as we embark on the Reconciling in Christ process, it is about welcoming the stranger. All these things we do as a community follow this prophecy of caring for the least. We can be a model for our fellow citizens of how to find success as a community.
But it’s even more important to consider how we can expand on such efforts in our nation. In a democracy, we have the right to vote with this prophecy in mind. Social Security, Medicare, Affordable Care Act, programs that invest in people and help them flourish. Do these things fit this prophecy’s guidance for doing justice, and living rightly, and thus being a successful nation?
This is a season of going back to school . . . and of football. It is also a season of looking ahead for the last sixty days before a really important election. Can this prophecy in Matthew 25 be our guide as we discern candidates and go to the ballot box? Amen.
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, September 1, 2024
YouTube: https://youtu.be/61zPlrW6EH4
Notes
1. See, for example, my last sermon, “The Yeasty Bread and Wine of Transformation.”
2. The Greek word behind “hell” in James 3:6, and throughout most of the New Testament, is actually the name of a valley near Jerusalem, Gehenna, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Ben Hinnom. The Valley of Ben Hinnom is notorious in the Old Testament as a place of child sacrifice. For further explanation, see my webpage “Bailie on the Fires of Hell,” or my sermon, “Live in God’s Love — or Continue Down the Road to Hellish Violence” (Proper 6A 2014).
3. Since “Son of Man” is Jesus’ preferred way of talking about himself, I mention this in many of my sermons in connection with the theme that Jesus came to show us a better way of being human. “Son of Man” = the Next Generation of Being Human. But I also occasionally explain its background in Daniel 7; see these two recent sermons: Proper 15B, Proper 7B.
4. In Matthew 25:32, the NRSV (as well as the NIV and the NJB) really throws off the interpretation by translating the pronoun “them” as “people.” Here’s the full verse in the NRSV: “All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. . . .” “People” is simply the pronoun “them,” whose clear referent is “nations.” So the NRSV has effectively swapped “people” for “nations,” thereby more than opening the door to reading this as a judgment of individual people instead of nations. In vv. 37 and 46, the Greek text names those on the right as “the just” (hoi dikaioi); I remind the reader that we are picturing nations and not just people and so translate it as, “the just nations.” In vv. 44 and 46, the Greek text refers to those on the left simply with the plural pronoun “they” or “these”; in v. 44 I again recall the original referent from v. 32, “nations,” and translate it as “these nations.”
5. The Greek word is epiphia, which most literally designates a “kid,” a young goat.
6. aiōnios appear 3 times in the passage: v. 41, “eternal fire” (pyr), and twice in v. 46, “eternal punishment” (kolasin), and “eternal life” (zōē). I argue for a different translation for aiōnios in the text of the sermon. For more see my webpage “‘Eternal Life’ in Scripture.”
